What’s Wrong With “Girls”

Right now there are only two TV shows that I watch — HOARDERS, especially for the episodes with Matt Paxton, or Drs. Robin Zasio and Suzanne Chabaud — and HBO’s GIRLS.

And I’m seeing a lot that I like about GIRLS. To my surprise, for example, I’m really enjoying Lena Dunham (left) as a comedienne, as an actress. I know she writes and produces the show, and I expected her to be a writer who acts, but I suspect she might be the reverse. She is someone who is immediately distinct and funny — even before she does or says anything — and some of her reactions are priceless. The scene in which she finds out that her first boyfriend was gay can be replayed again and again.

But something has seemed to me a bit off about the show, and yesterday I figured out what it is.

The problem can be summarized as a lack of perspective. The writer (sometimes writers) knows what happens, but doesn’t yet know what it means. And so a lot of GIRLS feels like what it probably is — real events, stuff that actually happened to somebody, amplified into the realm of comedy.

But because the writer doesn’t yet have the insight to completely know what these events mean, or even what really happened (in terms of other people), she doesn’t know what to amplify. And so the scenes generally have the shock of something raw and interesting — something unexpected — followed by a resolution or an elaboration that doesn’t quite satisfy and doesn’t feel true — in both senses of the term, neither factually true nor artistically true.

And then these scenes are augmented by imaginative stuff that very clearly did NOT happen — but again, because Dunham and her associates don’t know what it all really means, anyway, the imaginative stuff also rings slightly tin-eared, because the imaginative content isn’t really bolstering any overarching themes or ideas. It all feels random.

Stuff happens, and the one thing writer DOES know is that no matter what the women in the show are OK. They are almost always, even when ridiculous, sort of right, or trying to be right in the face of wrong, or on their way to becoming right. Even when we can see, very clearly, that they are none of those things.

The lack of perspective is most clear in the scenes — and there are lots of them — in which older characters are depicted. If you’re older than 30, it almost takes work to cast your mind back to being 24, to remember HOW OLD 35 SEEMED. Whenever a character who is older than 30 says something in GIRLS — especially when such a character explains himself or herself — it rings false. The characters don’t say or think things that the characters would say or think, but rather say and think things that you might think they’d say or think if you were in your early twenties. In other words, you’d be guessing, and you’d be wrong.

I find Lena Dunham fascinating, in that she seems gifted and astoundingly mature and yet limited — and to some degree even self-limited — by a young person’s perspective. Like a lot of young people, she is a bit preoccupied by her generation as a generation. She seems to want to make a generational pronouncement. (I well understand this. If you were to go back, but why would you, to read the stuff I wrote in my twenties, I was always going into generational spokesman mode. I think my favorite author, Fitzgerald, may have loosed that madness upon the world.)

In the end, I think what we’re getting in GIRLS is not the story of a generation, but a record of a generation’s youthful self-delusion and misperception — along with the ancillary benefits of a generation’s wit and humor, and a record of mating and social practices. And all of these have value. They just don’t have the highest value that one would hope for and that maybe people were expecting.

Or to put it another way, I don’t need to watch anymore, but I want to see the next thing Dunham does, and especially the thing after that.